


It is almost possible - it is possible - we have gone up and done it

by Joysweeper



Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Daemons, Gen, Reality Hopping, time travel sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 14:02:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17788757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joysweeper/pseuds/Joysweeper
Summary: What does it take to keep Luke from changing the past for the better?





	It is almost possible - it is possible - we have gone up and done it

**Author's Note:**

> This is a polished, trimmed down version of [something I wrote in 2012](https://distantskies.dreamwidth.org/105713.html) for an RP setting, Distant Skies, which was His Dark Materials-inspired. Characters stumbled across portals called ’windows’ leading to a city where they could meet people from other realities - including ones like their own but in the past or future - and venture into those realities and change things. Going to the hubworld also meant suddenly having a dæmon, a talking animal-shaped manifestation of the soul.
> 
> Luke found a window in a temple on Yavin IV, not long before the Black Fleet Crisis; his dæmon was something like a Melter and named Sycorax. In the hubworld he met a Clone Wars-era Anakin Skywalker and revealed their relationship, though soon after that Anakin's player had to stop playing him. The convention when this happens is usually that the character returns to their reality and their window closes. But there was no way Luke Skywalker was going to take that lying down.
> 
> So I had to ask myself what it would take for him to turn away from reopening that window and changing history.

That distinctive, disconcerting sensation that came with leaving one reality for another welled and subsided as the Force adjusted in and around him. Luke rode it out. Hidden under his jacket, the part of his dæmon Sycorax that wasn't running in shadow nerves down his arm and spine extended numerous slender tentilla, the tips curled like shells and solid as stone, reflecting the careful job he'd done on minimizing and screening his Force-presence. The last time he'd visited an older Coruscant, a _much_ older one, he hadn't done enough to conceal himself and it had gone poorly. Revan was inclined to blame the Jedi of her time, but if he hadn’t been there nothing would have happened.

The window Anakin had used opened into a kind of narrow alley between pourstone plinths taller than he was, deserted but for a public sanitation droid cruising away. Despite the early hour there was natural light and everything seemed... clean. Compared to Cittàgazze's dead stillness it was noisy, with the changeable drone of aircar traffic, the faint hum of air quality control fans, and the blended murmur of many people talking and living, but Luke knew 'his' version of Coruscant well enough to be aware that this was what passed for silence here, at least when outside. Even the air was, for this world, fresh and sweet. 

Even keeping his Force sense small and harder to detect, Luke could pick up on the background emanation of an old, _old_ city world, well populated for a very long time. He could have been in any number of the more highly-placed districts of the Coruscant he knew. Quite distinct from Revan's Coruscant; there, all kinds of little details had been different enough that it had been easy to imagine that was a different planet entirely. Four thousand years will do that.

Luke hadn’t come unprepared. He’d done research and consulted with Tyria Sarkin, and had come dressed in the kind of clothing one of the Antarian Rangers might have worn: a sturdy leather jacket, blue trousers festooned with pockets, a billed cap. There would be difficulties if he met a real Ranger, not the least of which was that his breast patch identified him as originating from Toprawa and he didn't even have the accent. But in this era Rangers could show up pretty much anywhere in Republic space without too much concern, and they were often Force-Sensitive and trained to a degree, so if he didn’t draw too much attention even a passing Jedi would probably think he belonged.

“We’re not going to find him standing here worrying about it,” his dæmon said. “You’re ready. Let’s go.” Sycorax shifted her tentilla, melting several together. The coiled tips clicked each against the others, but she kept them solid. She sounded more confident than the rest of him felt.

Luke squared his shoulders and set out in the same direction the cylindrical sanitation droid had headed while he paused, turning the same corner - and stopping as the breath caught in his chest.

He was on the Temple Court, the semicleared region atop the Temple Precinct. Ahead of him, close enough that the rising sun covered him in its shadow, the fortress-bulk of Coruscant’s great Jedi Temple soared a kilometer into the sky, its five towers piercing still further. It was beautiful, and he felt like the bottom of his stomach had dropped into his new footwear.

Luke knew a _version_ of the Temple. A Temple that was gutted, desecrated, a haven for vermin. It had suffered under neglect, and Palpatine’s revisions and petty vandalism, and wars and bombardments, and the rising of the _Lusankya_. The version Luke knew was pocked and streaked with blasterfire, the statues were missing or without heads, and the towers had all collapsed. Only something of its silhouette and the shape of the cleared court around it were really recognizable.

Even with his ability to sense the Force drawn circumspectly around him, he could feel that the differences ran much further. Luke had known the Jedi Order was ancient. And hadn’t he seen, a few months ago, a smaller version of the Temple erected on this spot in Revan’s time, and felt that even that had been very old? But that had been different, that had been further away from the ravaged halls he’d walked, it hadn’t quite connected like this.

He knew, suddenly, in his bones, that even in the midst of galactic war the Jedi Temple on Coruscant had been a beacon of justice and learning, sometimes-home to hundreds, maybe thousands of students of the Force. It was the beating heart of an Order that had run in an unbroken chain from before the dawn of hyperspace-capable human civilization through the millennia, teachers passing it on to their students who became teachers themselves, working and meditating and studying to improve their knowledge of the Force.

This was what had been lost. Just about as he'd been born.

Most of Sycorax went liquid, smearing under his jacket. His knees weakened, and Luke leaned heavily against the wall, his breath coming harder. He couldn’t look away.

Years ago he had dedicated his life to restoring the Jedi Order, in the full knowledge that it was a monstrous task. And he had made progress, yes! But that progress was a few dozen people rattling around in a temple made by slaves for an ancient Sith’s glory. They had gap-filled contradictory records scrounged and reconstructed from dozens of sources, cherished palimpsests from works the Empire had defiled, brief instruction from people who had been Jedi but wouldn’t stay. They had a handful of Masters who’d never had any kind of formal training. He had declared himself and the others Masters on his own discretion. They had no one more senior to decide it.

Luke had never known the Jedi as they had been. Despite twenty years of determined censorship he'd found some descriptions and even holograms and witnesses, yes, and he’d visited former temples of every size and description. He had enough ability with psychometry to get a sense of what they had been, but the sense of how they had fallen was stronger, the loss and grief attached to the sites and any artifacts flooding out old splendor.

There wasn’t even enough left to rebuild, not the same way as it had been rebuilt many times in the past. It was built in Luke’s own ideas and convictions and the hope that they were right, and he was so very aware of how wrong he could be and how devastating any error could prove. He had a sudden wild fantasy of saving Anakin, averting his fall and the Republic’s fall, and trying to live here and take his students and family but being judged wanting, disciples of some artificial pretender to the Jedi Order.

Pain made him notice the fine meltmassif needle pushing out from his skin. When he looked at it it softened and pulled itself back into his flesh, leaving a tiny spot of blood on his hand.

“Of course it’s the Jedi Order,” Sycorax said intensely. She was as close to angry as he’d ever known her. Of course it wasn’t anger, really. “The chain still hasn’t been broken - we are a Jedi, people who would know have said we are. Ben, Yoda, Father, Vima, Callista, Palpatine, Nick, C’baoth - should I go on?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “Eleven years ago we were the only living Jedi anywhere, Luke! The only one out, acting, in the galaxy. And look at what there is now. The Jensaari and Ysanna have joined us, the Caamasi Remnant passes us memnii, the Antarian Rangers are re-forming and have pledged their support... The New Republic gives us every resource it can and passes along every lead. The Yavin Praxeum stands. An entire academy for Jedi, and it’s small but it is growing. Where there was one, there are hundreds.”

Luke found his voice as she paused. “But we’re not this. We’re not even close.”

“No. We’re different. But we are Jedi, and we can’t stop just because so much was lost. Learn from this, all that you can, and bring it back. Just because this reality might not get the Empire and the purges doesn’t mean ours is spoiled. Nothing’s ever entirely dead and gone, remember?” What had he done before he’d had a dæmon? These thoughts would have come, this wild, defiant hope that he’d had so much more strongly as a youth, but perhaps with less fervor.

Forcing himself to breathe slowly and evenly, Luke wiped his face - when had he started weeping? - and made himself calm. “You’re right,” he said when he could speak clearly again. “Of course, you’re right.”

If she had been part of someone else she might have been smug, but she was quiet. “It’s all we can hope for, but we have to hold on to that hope. We’re different, but we’re up there with the best of them.” Her tone changed, became firmer. “Also, Leia would never want to live here and you know it. Now. We were going to find out if anything’s happened to Father?”

Right. Luke pushed himself away from the wall and looked back up at the Jedi Temple. It was still a very impressive building. He wanted to go in. He knew Tionne wouldn’t have hesitated. And the sight, and his doubts about his own efforts, just made him want to work harder to save it - he had not really moved in time, this was another reality entirely and things did not have go go as they had in his home reality. But the big picture would wait.

Closing his eyes, he stretched out carefully in the Force, listening for a familiar presence.

The Anakin of this time was so _young_ , and his presence was so different. It was hardly like Vader’s at all, or even as heavy as when he returned to being Anakin Skywalker. In a way it reminded him more of Kyp’s sense. There was something like that suggestion of promise not yet fulfilled, a similar burning acid loss and anger and darkness.

It only took a second before he could tell. Yes. Yes, Anakin had been here, and recently enough that his signature was clear, though it helped that few people had passed through this part of the Temple Court in that time. Luke couldn’t tell when this had been exactly, but he tasted the baffled wavering of intention without an outlet, and frustration, and knew it must have been before Luke managed to get the window re-opened.

Still alive? Luke asked silently. The Force responded with a rare certainty: yes.

Where? It told him nothing. He felt Sycorax’s cynicism and reminded himself that the Force wasn’t there to hold his hand. Sometimes it favored him, sometimes it didn’t. But he knew this much, and it crossed his mind that he’d fulfilled his own first objective. The tall, troubled young Anakin Skywalker Luke had met and just started to know was alive. He was so like and unlike Luke had been at that age, so much less certain than in scraps of old propaganda. That Luke had a chance to _know_ him made his breath catch. Of course he’d follow that chance, and maybe things would turn out better for so many people.

Still keeping as quiet as he could, Luke found the impressions that Anakin had made on that most recent trip, and guessed that the trail with more of a sour tone of checked anxiety was the one that he had made while leaving.

Anakin had gone back towards the Temple. Not a surprise. Sycorax muttered scraps of plans that Luke countered with caution. He couldn’t just send his mind out looking, some of the Masters would pick up on him. Could he just… walk on in? He _wanted_ to go in, he wanted to see the Temple up close and meet its inhabitants. What if Anakin had left again, gone somewhere else on the planet, or offworld entirely? Was there someone he could ask unobtrusively, or could convince to ask for him? What if he met someone he knew and couldn’t hide a spark of recognition?

When he first sensed something wrong he couldn’t immediately tell what it was, just that a wash of cold dismay had overcome all his anticipation. He cast about and was shocked to find a familiar signature.

Palpatine. _Palpatine_ was here - no, up there, in an aircar leaving the Temple! He could see it! Sucking in a breath Luke reached out, forgetting his caution.

The man was masked under so many deceptive layers it made all of Luke’s efforts look halfhearted. He appeared to be merely a strong, benign presence. No amount of masking could have fooled Luke, though - he’d been this creature’s prisoner, even if only briefly. He had been overtaken with the compulsion to bend the knee, cooperated and studied him, learned from him, broken free, and his mind had been torn open -

Luke felt himself starting to sweat and went through the warding techniques he’d taught himself after Leia saved him. Had that been a tickling probe, faint as imagination, or had it _been_ imagination? On the second Death Star there had been literally nothing Luke could do to keep his mind from being invaded. On Byss Luke had thought he’d found a way, but the way things had gone… Luke remembered. Sycorax’s tentacles circled his arm, squeezing it underneath the jacket. He remembered. 

His dæmon wrapped a part of herself around his elbow, a heavy sleeve of oil and stone, and reminded him that _this_ wasn’t the Palpatine who’d had the time and resources to become what Luke had faced and fought. He didn’t have that degree of raw power or the freedom to use it at will - his game now was a subtle one that relied on deception. And in their proper time, he had been able to invade minds without anything so detectable as probes - there had only been that sensation like a great wind filling Luke’s ears, making it hard to think clearly. A sensation that was absent now.

He smiled tightly and without humor, and the solid coiled tips of his dæmon’s appendages softened and unrolled or melted, one by one. The idea crossed his mind that he should stop, conceal himself, remember why he came here, but Sycorax thought, _we can take him, we can end this here and now_ and the thought spread through his body, warming like a shot of whiskey, burning away the dread and the remembered submission. Luke acted.

_I know who you are! I won’t let you do this!_ he called out into the Force, reckless, hoping it could be felt in the Temple, and he was rewarded with a cold anger from the aircar, diffused confused signatures from within the building. He pressed on, stretching up with his mind, finding the engine and leaning on it so it labored and the aircar began to slow, to sink. He would bring it down here to the boulevard, show the Jedi what their patron really was. The masked presence gave him a narrow burst of pain, meant to freeze him where he stood, and Luke could have laughed, he’d had so much worse in the past, this was nothing, he was stronger. The part of him embodied in his dæmon reached eagerly for that presence, ready for the mask to crack.

Something gave and he had just the briefest flash of sensation - the sense of Palpatine in that sinking aircar speaking with feigned fear into a handheld comm unit. It lasted no more than a second before the connection closed off, but Luke felt a chill again, building dread.

“We can take him,” Sycorax pleaded. “We _can_.”

“Only if he stands and fights.” Reluctantly he withdrew his attention from the engine, which labored noisily as it recovered, and his best chance to stop Palpatine here and now roared away. “I have a bad feeling about this...”

The Temple was stirring. All the lives within were set in motion, many presences pulling back together from the walls, others drawing towards certain points - heading to the roof or towards him. The brightness of all of them and the Temple itself made it hard to sense individuals, but he was suddenly sure that Anakin wasn’t there, or Ben, and probably not Yoda…

An open-topped speeder wailed up out of some point high in the Temple. There must be a hangar there. It circled at a height, and he saw a Bith in flagging robes peering down, felt the sweep of a Force-user searching, and then a wash of disorientation that became a plunging weariness hit him. Behind it was the Jedi’s restrained excitement, an alarmed sort of… relief? Other speeders were starting up.

He shook off the weariness the Bith Jedi was trying to impose on him and had a shock of realization.

“They think we’re a Sith!” Sycorax gasped. “We have to make them understand - but they want to fight-”

There would be fewer Knights and Masters here than before the war but they’d be less inclined to stop and talk. Luke stepped back, and as he started to hear more of them approach he shrank his presence down, put a bleary film over his appearance, _ran_.

From his shoulder his dæmon proposed hiding, waiting, finding ways to approach one Jedi alone to explain, but she could feel the deep burn of horrified chagrin as well as he. This world was so very like his Coruscant but separated by almost forty years, two regime changes, multiple battles, a plague, the _Lusankya_ ; and it wasn’t like he’d ever thoroughly explored this part of _his_ Coruscant anyway. All the tricks he knew put together might not be enough. Maybe no one would die and he could tell them the incredible truth, but the fallout from that! And meanwhile he’d have left _his_ reality, _his_ Jedi without him. For weeks, maybe longer. However much he wanted to be here, he could not abandon them.

Slipping back the way he had come Luke retreated back through the window into the empty city of Cittàgazze, and pulled himself up onto a flat, tiled rooftop. After Coruscant this city seemed Tatooine-hot and almost Tatooine-open, though far more humid.

“Jedi Orders just don’t like me,” he said with false levity, his heart still pounding. All right, his visit with Revan to Coruscant in her time hadn’t ended very well either, but it had been better than this. They thought he was Sith!

Sycorax’s visible tentilla were shrinking as more of her withdrew through Luke’s skin, re-forming some of those shadow nerves he’d had and lost so long ago at Mindor. She did this when he was on edge. “They just don’t know the situation like we do. How could they? But it’s a setback.”

He stared over the roof's edge down at the window, innocuous looking at midday, and calmed his breathing and heartrate. No one had come through yet. Of course they hadn’t. Windows were hard to see at most angles and didn’t stand out to any other senses. If they had someone skilled in psychometry, or if they searched the area carefully enough, they would find it.

If they did and they came through - well, Luke knew firsthand that anything truly sentient could not arrive in this reality without some part of them pulling free and forming into a dæmon, a painful process that took time to recover from. If left where they fell they could be killed by one of the nearly-invisible things that roamed these city, that were responsible for its emptiness. Kept safe and allowed to recover, well, then some part of them that had been internal was now a dæmon, and that came with a whole list of benefits, limitations, complications. He was lucky Sycorax was small and her weight easily adjusted to. Large ones could make things difficult, dangerous.

He wondered how Anakin had had to adjust to Sol-Karan. Of course, she was a small rawwk and could fit into a cockpit with him. He could probably hide her in his clothing around people. It was another thing Luke hadn’t had the chance to ask.

Time passed. The days were long here, in this longitude, on this world. Luke settled in and talked to himself for company. Sycorax eventually apologized for her recklessness, but of course it was his recklessness too, his own hopes and deferred dreams, a return of those feelings he’d held so strongly in his twenties. He’d worried for a time that she was the part of him that was tempted by darkness. She wasn’t, but he wished he could talk about this with another Jedi, another Jedi’s dæmon, who could be curious and not afraid.

Ever since Brakiss had followed him and part of him had become that rangy, striped ranphynx, Luke had strictly barred his other students from visiting Cittàgazze. He considered that again now. Many of them would probably fare better, but there was no undoing this change, there was no consolidating the self again, and he didn’t know how many of them could be denying some kind of great inner conflict within themselves. Years on Yavin hadn’t helped Brakiss as much as he’d thought. Now wherever that beautiful, uncertain young man was, he was never more than a few meters from another half of his nature.

“We told everyone not to go. He could have asked about it,” Sycorax muttered. He soothed her; there was no point in going over it yet again, not even to kill time waiting.

Maybe allowing an old Republic Jedi to come here and be divided would render them worse off anyway. Maybe he was being selfish sitting here trying to make contact this way, when it would be more sensible to close the window and try again some other time. But if Anakin was in the area and heard about the disturbance, surely he’d check the window immediately.

Time passed and Luke meditated with half-open eyes, trying to make himself empty and complete, but still aware enough to catch sight of any changes.

Drowsy-voiced he asked, “Is it ethical to change a timeline without even asking anyone who lives in it? In the end… well, in the end a lot of things worked out for ours.”

It was a pretty stupid question and Sycorax treated it like one. “Not for Alderaan, or Caamas, or the original Kivans, or I could go on. The timeline is already changed, if it was even fixed to start. There’s no telling what things will be like there in forty years. It might not even be recognizable.”

Of course he was going to try to change things. There wasn’t really any doubt. 

The day aged and began to die. As the single sun lowered over the sea, there was movement below. But what came through was a droid, some model Luke wasn’t familiar with.

It looked something like the common B1 droids the Separatists had used, but sturdier, less cheap-looking, darker in color, and while it reeled as it came through and gave off a generally confused impression, it didn’t shut down from the loss of signal. It also did not split into body and dæmon.

Jedi didn’t use droids much. He’d have expected maybe some kind of floating drone if they sent mechanical investigators at all. Why was it here? 

Sycorax shifted and drove still more of herself out of the way, down along his spine, as he watched it scan the empty street with its white photoreceptors. She had an answer. “Because it’s not Jedi.”

“It’s one of Palpatine’s. Makes sense,” he said in a similar tone, too soft to carry down there. He hadn’t been in very close contact with those Jedi, but he’d struggled for... at least a few minutes with the Lord of the Sith. Palpatine would have a better idea of where Luke had been. “Just one, so there are probably a lot of them spread out and looking. But why a Separatist droid? They should be thin on Coruscant.”

Sending clone troopers out would have made more sense, though they would be disabled by coming here. Then Luke realized something he’d completely neglected to consider. Anakin had to be meeting him regularly, they didn’t yet have the cagy, antagonistic relationship that had developed by his time... what if Palpatine knew about the windows and what they did? What if he knew _everything_?

Sycorax poked through his skin again with another needle, impatient. “Look, it moves smoothly, it’s dark in color, it could be infiltration and he’s throwing whatever he has around so it looks like a Sith attacked him. Worry about that later!”

Yes. Right now it was more important that he keep the droid, now wandering in circles and apparently baffled by suddenly being on a different planet, from going back through the window with a report. Luke stood, silhouetting himself against the sky.

The droid reacted more quickly than he’d have expected, bringing a short, squat blaster rifle to bear on Luke. Thoughtlessly he allowed the Force to guide him and dived sideways as the shots peppered the wall, rolled back to his feet, and stood again with his lightsaber in hand. Snap-hiss! His opponent fired again, low, at angles where he couldn’t quite deflect the shots back at it.

Still firing, now it was backing towards the window. Trying to get back through, or looking for an advantage in the fight? Luke smiled tightly. If all he’d had was a lightsaber, maybe this strategy, tying him up with this carefully aimed fire, would have worked. Maybe.

Calling on the Force without conscious thought to do so, he leaped off the edge of the roof in a high tumbling arc, deflecting blaster bolts as he went, to land between the droid and the window. The Force would warn him if reinforcements came from behind.

One glowing slash left the droid without a working blaster. It tried to attack him with its fists and feet, and it was quick, but he was faster, sweeping his blade in a great circular motion. It hopped back on its one remaining leg, almost falling, sparks popping from the stumps of its other limbs.

Luke didn’t really think he could talk this droid down, but he could afford to try. “I don’t suppose you’d stand down. We could work something out.”

It hopped forwards again and tried to, as far as he could tell, headbutt him. Rather shocked, Luke bisected it vertically in one stroke. Mercifully, it seemed like that was enough, and with a deep electronic splutter it ‘died’.

“ _Mou kei_ followed by _sai tok_. Removing several major limbs in one circular motion, then bisecting the opponent,” Sycorax noted clinically. She named techniques he’d read about in a database on Revan’s Coruscant. “I don’t think we’ve ever done both on one before.”

“It was a very persistent droid.” Luke shook his head. “Good balance gyros too, and that technique with the aimed fire would have worked if it had reinforcements. I guess it’s a good thing these weren’t on the front lines. ...Aren’t.”

Amused, his daemon said, “Your tenses will never really recover. So, now what?”

He wanted to go back to the roof and wait and hope some more. The thing was, Luke couldn’t take the chance that Palpatine would notice this droid had disappeared and remember where it had been assigned to search. The man was too canny to be that careless.

Exhaling slowly, Luke winced. “I hate to do it but I think I have to put a hold on finding Father.” Sycorax groaned and he raised his voice slightly. “Really! I was too rash today and the risks are starting to mount. I don’t want to make everything worse.”

“I know but I don’t like it,” his dæmon grumbled.

“As far as I can tell it’s going to be at least a year before the point of no return,” he said implacably. Before the war draws to a close, before he and his sister are conceived - “That is still weird,” Sycorax notes - before Anakin falls. There’s time. There has to be time.

For now he might have made things worse already. Or better, maybe the incident would lead to suspicion for Palpatine, he didn’t know. But he couldn’t cast aside his responsibilities in his own reality to try to prevent catastrophe in this one, and that’s what going back in or guarding the window long term would amount to. Anakin absolutely would want to check on it, but Palpatine… Luke didn’t want to know what Palpatine would do with access to other realities.

“If he ever came through, just himself, we could just take him to Myrkr before he could resist,” Sycorax suggested, knowing full well that Palpatine, at any point, was far too canny for that. It was still a nice image.

Another time. There would be other chances, at some other time; he could eat and sleep and spar and get things done at the Academy, make sure there were no big fires he was called to put out, and come up with new plans. Droids of his own stationed to guard, maybe? He’d think about it. Luke took a communicator in hand and made the necessary call. Soon after, the window was gone.

Using the tip of his lightsaber on a wall, Luke cut great Aurebesh letters where they could easily be seen from the window should it return. They read, Sidious Knows Where This Is. If during normal rotation the window opened again and Anakin came through on his own, Luke knew, he needed to be cautious. If Palpatine didn’t know before today, this would give him an idea.

“Next time,” Luke vowed to himself.

Sycorax coiled around the back of his neck, warm and smooth. “We’re not giving up that easily.”


End file.
